The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East

This Edinburgh Companion seeks to develop a postcolonial framework for addressing the Middle East. The first collection of essays on this subject, it assembles some of the world's foremost postcolonialists to explore the critical, theoretical and disciplinary possibilities that inquiry into this region opens for postcolonial studies.

Throughout its twenty-four chapters, its focus is on literary and cultural critique. It draws on texts and contexts from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries as case studies, and deploys the concept of 'post/colonial modernity' to reveal the enduring impact of colonial and imperial power on the shaping of the region. And it covers a wide and significant range of political, social, and cultural issues in the Middle East during that period - including the heritage of Orientalism in the region; the roots and contemporary branches of the Israel-Palestine conflict; colonial history, state formation and cultures of resistance in Egypt, Turkey, the Maghreb and the wider Arab world; the clash of tradition and modernity in regional and transnational expressions of Islam; the politics of gender and sexuality in the Arab world; the ongoing crises in Libya, Iraq, Iran and Syria; the Arab Spring; and the Middle Eastern refugee crisis in Europe.

Anna Ball is Senior Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University.
Karim Mattar is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Abstract
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Contributors
List of Figures
Note on Transliterations

Introduction
1. Dialectics of Post/Colonial Modernity in the Middle East: A Critical, Theoretical, and Disciplinary Overview; Anna Ball and Karim Mattar
2. Edward Said and the Institution of Postcolonial Studies; Karim Mattar
3. Postcolonialism and Modern Arabic Literature: Twenty-First Century Horizons; Waïl S. Hassan
4. Interview with Ahdaf Soueif; Anna Ball
5. Interview with Sinan Antoon; Karim Mattar

I. The Colonial Encounter: Discourses of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism
6. Between the Postcolonial and the Middle East: Writing the Subaltern in the Arab World; Juan R. I. Cole
7. Orientalism and World Literature: A Re-Reading of Cosmopolitanism in Taha Husayn's Literary World; Wen-Chin Ouyang
8. On Orientalist Genealogies: The Split Arab / Jew Figure Revisited; Ella Shohat
9. Colonial Violence, Law, and Justice in Egypt; Stephen Morton
10. Peripheral Visions: Translational Polemics and Feminist Arguments in Colonial Egypt; Marilyn Booth
11. Reimagining the Ottoman Legacy; Erdag Göknar

II. States of Post/Coloniality: Politics, Religion, Gender, Sexuality
12. Postcolonial Nations: Political or Poetic Allegories? (On Tahar Djaout's L'Invention du désert); Réda Bensmaïa
13. Passing Away: Despair, Eulogies, and Millennial Palestine; Salah D. Hassan
14. 'They are in the right because I love them': Literature and Palestine Solidarity in the 1980s; Anna Bernard
15. Nikes in Nineveh: Daesh, the Ruin, and the Global Logic of Eradication; Sadia Abbas
16. There was no 'Humble Task' in the Revolution: Anti-Colonial Activity and Arab Women; Anastasia Valassopoulos
17. The Queerness of Textuality and / as Translation: Ways of Reading Hoda Barakat's The Stone of Laughter; Lindsey Moore

III. The Post/Colonial Present: Crisis and Engagement in Global Context
18. Anglophone Arab Autobiography and the Postcolonial Middle East: Najla Said and Hisham Matar; Tahia Abdel Nasser
19. Bare Life in the 'New Iraq'; Ikram Masmoudi
20. Towards a Globalisation of Contemporary Iranian Literature?: Iranian Literary Blogs and the Evolution of the Literary Field; Laetitia Nanquette
21. Popular Culture and the Arab Spring; Caroline Rooney
22. The Syrian Revolution, Art, and the End of Ideology; miriam cooke
23. Biopolitical Landscapes of the 'Small Human': Figuring the Child in the Contemporary Middle Eastern Refugee Crisis in Europe; Anna Ball


24. Afterword: Critical Companionships, Urgent Affiliations; Anna Ball and Karim Mattar
Bibliography
Index